Chairs for everyone – and everything

The weekly micro-decorating newsletter * Issue 6 of 13, SS23 *
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No matter how small your place is, there's always room for a variety of chairs. At bare minimum, you need to be able to sit down for a meal, lounge for relaxation, and support home-office tasks comfortably. Depending on your circumstances, you might also conjure up appropriate seating for family and friends.

But chairs can accomodate more than just people. Their ingenious shapes and mechanics are suited to a range of household objects. Why not offer comfort to all sorts of everyday companions?

I got onto this train of thought after picking up a scaled-down rattan chair at Bronze Home Decor, one of my favourite Toronto vintage shops. It quickly became the new home of a potted snake plant, but I could also see it being the temporary throne of a favourite paperback or a resting spot for a ceramic figurine.

Leave it to Ikea to make a chair purpose-built for holding an object. When I first spotted KRUBBET in my local outlet, I thought it was simply a decorative riff on the hairpin-legged furniture of the nineteen-fifties:

Turns out it's a phone-charging station that allows your device to kick back and assume three different states of repose.

Our phones are such a theatre of mental agitation that it makes sense that they need a designated area to calm down while we do the same.

Practicality is admirable, but sometimes a small chair is just an invitation to play.

My Vitra miniatures make fine homes for squeezable stress-relief toys, and I'm certain to find other whimsical things that fit their curves.

Kids' furniture is where you'll find some of the most inventive small chairs – appeals, no doubt, to the aesthetic ambitions of the parents who buy them. I'm a big fan of ecoBirdy's Charlie Chair with its eye-catching proportions and emphatic roundedness, available at Peach Boy in Toronto.

It owes its speckled surface to recycled plastic toys, so any hesitation in opening my wallet will be offset by the reward of being environmentally conscious. And of course, I'm already imagining getting it home and facing the next dilemma – or pleasure, to be more accurate – of what to put on it.

Got an alternative use for a chair?

Does a simple stool compel you to invent new reasons for it to exist? Share your furniture secrets with fellow members of guy in the Comments below.

As always,